


Flickered Upon Ocean's Insanity

by tisfan



Series: Tony Stark Bingo [44]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Bottom Bucky Barnes, Dubious Consent, Forced Bonding, M/M, Sentinel/Guide, Sentinel/Guide Bonding, Sex Pollen, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-25 14:14:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22497433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tisfan/pseuds/tisfan
Summary: Card 3023 - Square R4 - SoulbondTony is the youngest Guide ever... problem? He doesn't want to be one.Hydra has the perfect solution.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Tony Stark
Series: Tony Stark Bingo [44]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1030077
Comments: 22
Kudos: 239
Collections: Tony Stark Bingo 2020





	Flickered Upon Ocean's Insanity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ceealaina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceealaina/gifts).



> So, this is forced bonding/sex pollen/dub-con so you know your own comfort levels more than I do
> 
> Also, my first attempt to write S/g without literally ANYTHING except reading one other story and looking at some FandomWiki stuff...

Tony Stark was not quite twelve when he manifested as a Guide. Youngest ever. With all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities that such a position had.

He started drinking too much by the time he was twelve and a half, and by fourteen, had such a bad reputation as being a troublemaker that no respectable Sentinel would even consider him as a partner. He’d gotten himself thrown out of not one, but three different training academies for Guides and his father threw up his hands, called him a miserable failure, and ignored him as much as possible.

So, Tony went on to MIT at fifteen, continued drinking, studied robotics, and blew stuff up on a regular basis.

It was a good life, he’d decided.

The drinking kept him from feeling other people’s… well, feelings. He had a good friend in his across the hall dorm mate, and by sophomore year, he and Rhodey were living together. He had his robots that didn’t have any messy human feelings at all, and he was as happy as it was possible to be.

Except for the hole. 

Everyone had always told him that, as a Guide, he would be incomplete, part of him forever missing, without a Sentinel to protect him, without a purpose for his empathy.

Twelve year old Tony had told people to leave him alone.

Fourteen year old Tony was even ruder, told people to kindly fuck off, only, not kindly.

Sixteen year old Tony mentioned a few times that he knew how to fill that hole just fine.

Eighteen year old Tony was beginning to wonder if everyone had had a point. But it was too late to worry about it now. He had no training, he was a shitty empath, he pretty much hated people, and he was very, very bad at calming himself down, much less anyone else.

So, drinking turned to drugs and an excess of sex, turned into endless nights in the lab trying to figure out the latest puzzle. 

He was fine.

That’s what he kept telling himself, anyway. He was fine.

Four days after his parents’ funeral, he was still telling himself he was fine.

His father’s business partner, Obadiah Stane, walked in, supposedly to console Tony about his parents. Or maybe to talk about the business. Tony didn’t know; he was stupidly drunk. And he didn’t much like Obie anyway. There was nothing much wrong with him, exactly, except that his emotions always seemed a tad on the slimy side. Tony ignored it, or drank his way past it. Obie was family.

Except this time, when he came in, Obie had a half dozen mercenaries behind him. “That’s him,” Obie said, and he held out a hand. A dark-haired man with scruffy good looks and a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, handed Obie a briefcase.

“Obie, what the hell is going on?” Tony asked.

The scruffy man punched Tony in the face without hesitation, the steady buzz of his emotional state not flickering even a bit. While Tony was spitting blood and trying to crawl away, the man tied him up, gagged him, and stuck a canvas sack over his head.

“We good?” the man asked, raising an eyebrow at Obie, who was counting through bound bundles of hundred dollar bills.

“He’s all but worthless,” Obie said.

“Obviously not,” the man said. “We paid you.”

“No complaints.” Obie ignored Tony’s yelling, pleading, cursing. Patted him on the cheek -- as bad as Tony’s face hurt from the first blow, it was as good as a slap -- Obie just grinned. “It’s about time you earned your upkeep.”

“Is it ready?” the man carrying Tony like a sack of woozy grain asked. Tony was struggling as best he could, but the man didn’t even seem to notice.

“Body’s planted,” someone else. “They’ll think he got drunk, set fire to the house by accident. He’s always blowing stuff up. No one will think twice about it.”

“Good.”

Tony was shifted in the man’s grip. Another man came up, eyed him. “Let’s keep the noise to a minimum.” He pulled something out of a case and-- 

The last thing Tony remembered was the glint of reflected flames on the needle in the man’s hand and an acidic, garlic taste in the back of his throat.

“Count backward from ten, please--”

* * *

The Soldier was waiting. 

His new Guide was being prepared for him.

This one… was different. 

He’d been dismissed by the Handler. Which meant the Soldier could go to the gym and practice his fighting. He could go to the training room and oversee the Red Room students. He could report to the range and practice with his weapons.

He could, in fact, sleep, if there was nothing else that occurred to him.

But he was waiting.

Finally, _finally_ , the technicians left the room. The Soldier waited until they passed, and then went to the maintenance room. His Guide was there, shivering, dressed in hospital scrubs. He was soaking wet, coughing, spluttering, on the floor. He’d been uncooperative, the Soldier thought. But as soon as the Soldier made a sound, his feet scraping against the linoleum, the Guide scrambled backward until he hit the wall. There was nowhere to go, and-- the Soldier looked. The reactor was already in place, the skin around it puffy and red, a few staple-stitches where they’d made the initial incision.

“Guide,” the Soldier said.

The man blinked at him, eyes red and furious and hurt, and the Soldier realized that he was young, not even twenty, more than likely, more boy than man. “No, I don’t do that, I told them, I told them, I don’t do that,” he said.

“You will,” the Soldier said. “For me.”

“You’re a Sentinel?” the man’s scepticism was palpable. “You can’t be, you’re a--”

The Soldier waited for the Guide to finish his observations, the enamel smooth wall around the Soldier’s mind that kept him safe. The Guides had made it, the Guides would maintain it. No emotion in or out. No being overwhelmed by his senses. No zoning.

“You will be my Guide,” the Soldier repeated. He reached out his hand, not even close enough to touch the Guide. But he wanted to. It was strange, wanting a thing. He wasn’t supposed to want things. He ate when fed, slept when told, fought and killed under orders. He didn’t _want_ things. He was the Fist of Hydra. 

There was something, though. Something about this beautiful boy. And the Soldier _wanted_ him. Wanted to take care of him and comfort him and keep him from being hurt ever again.

“I don’t do that,” the Guide repeated. The mask that was keeping him upright crumbled a little as he stared around the room, cold walls, the instruments of torture and pain. The water trough. Everything he had been through, before and after, the reactor was implanted. And he probably didn’t even know what the reactor could do to him. His lip wobbled. “I don’t even know how.”

“I will teach you,” the Soldier said, infinitely patient. There was a thread in his mind, one that had never been there before, and he reached for it, tiny, and frail thing that it was. Like a silver strand that went straight from him, to his Guide. “I will protect you. Take care of you. Come with me.”

When the Guide raised a weary hand to let the Soldier help him to his feet, the thread thickened, strengthened, until it was not a mere spider’s web connecting them, but a rope, coiled, tying them together.

The Soldier lifted him up, and caught him when he swooned. Scooped him up in a bridal carry. 

The Guide looked up at him with wide, dark eyes, fragile like a deer’s. “What’s your name?”

The Soldier had a feeling this was not a question he was supposed to answer, but he couldn’t deny his Guide anything that was in his power to give.

“James,” he said. He tasted it on his tongue. Not quite right, but close. “My name is James.”

“Tony,” the Guide said. He paused, then, gently, very, very carefully, he asked, “What happened to you? What’s… what’s wrong with you?”

“A great many things,” James said, and he wasn’t sure which question he was answering.

* * *

Tony let the man who called himself James practically carry him, too weak, too tired, and too damn scared to do anything else. He thought he could be strong for torture, and he had. Denied them everything they wanted, with smart assed remarks and swears. He didn’t beg, although he did demand, when they asked him questions, who they were working for, why had Obie done this. 

What he didn’t ask was what they wanted.

They were pretty fucking clear on that. They wanted him to serve as Guide to their strongest Sentinel. 

Tony didn’t do that. He told them he didn’t _do that._

It didn’t seem to make them stop. He would do it, or he would suffer.

“What is this?” he asked, tapping on his chest. It hurt, but not as much as he might have expected. He could feel the taps deep in his chest, like someone was playing the drums on his heart. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, and the humming that the thing made wasn’t comforting.

“Arc reactor,” James said. “It keeps you alive.”

“Funny how I was doing a great job of that on my own,” Tony muttered. It was sarcastic, but it was all that he could manage. He wobbled, knees going weak. He didn’t want to know how the machine in his chest was keeping him alive. It implied that someone could make him dead in a push of a button or something. 

Not that that had never been untrue; pull a trigger, poison a meal, cut a throat. It was amazingly easy to kill a human being by accident. It made one wonder why they kept doing it to each other on purpose.

Still, he’d have to know, eventually. If only because the first mandate of a prisoner was to escape.

James brought him to a room. It wasn’t a very nice room; smooth cement walls, a trifle colder than was comfortable, especially since Tony was still wet. No windows. Slick, linoleum floor. 

Not terribly well stocked with furniture, either.

Tony found himself staring at the huge bed that dominated the room, a king sized at least. White, hotel-style sheets, a thin blanket, and a truly ridiculous amount of pillows on top.

No table, no dresser, no chairs. Off to one side was a door, and through that door, Tony could see a shower, stacks of towels.

“What is this?”

“Bonding room,” James said. 

As if on queue, the door slid shut behind them and three deadbolts slammed home, one after the other, clack, clack, clack. Like nails in his coffin.

“But we did that,” Tony protested, his brain still stuttering on the stark reality of the bed, the lack of other amenities. A bonding, between Sentinel and Guide was often strengthened through sex; Tony knew that. Everyone knew that.

But Tony wasn’t sure that the bond between them could be any stronger than it already was. He’d never seen a bond like that; he’d never even read about one. Although, like all geniuses, he knew how much he didn’t know.

Tony uttered a cheerless laugh. “So, you’re going to what, fuck compliance into me?”

James blinked at him. “I can’t hurt you, you’re my Guide.”

Tony tapped the thing in his chest harder. “Hate to break it to you, pal, but I’m _already_ pretty damn hurt.” What was he doing, he wondered. Asking to be, what…. Raped? Stockholme syndromed? Good cop, bad cop, Tony goes with and does what the nicest person who kidnapped him says? Yeah, Tony had always known he had self-destructive tendencies; he just hadn’t known it was that bad.

“I can’t--” James touched Tony’s chin, lifted it gently with a strangely cool finger. Tony kept his eyes downcast because he didn’t want to look, and then--

“Holy shit, you have a _metal hand_?”

“Arm,” James said, softly. “Goes up to the shoulder.”

“That’s… okay, I’m not going to lie, that’s kinda awesome,” Tony admitted.

“Tony, I won’t hurt you, I promise. You’re my _Guide_. I’m going to take care of you. Just like you take care of me.”

“You keep saying that like your people didn’t just _rip a hole in my chest_ ,” Tony screamed, nails digging into his palms as he struggled with what he rather reluctantly concluded was going to be a complete emotional breakdown, and fuck it, and fuck everything, he fucking deserved to have one. 

James’ eyes widened a fraction, and he took Tony’s hand, gently opened it up. Tony didn’t want to let him, didn’t want-- he didn’t fucking want any of this, but James’ touch was kind and soft and Tony was going to end up sobbing into James’ shoulder, he just fucking knew it was going to happen. Once his hand was flat, James dropped a soft kiss into the center of Tony’s palm, looked up, and spoke in a bare whisper, the most perfect Italian Tony had heard since his mother used to sing him to sleep -- before his father sent him off to the first of many terrible boarding schools. “ _I need your help_ ,” he said.

Tony blinked, stunned out of his breakdown. “What?”

“ _We can work together, us against them._ ”

He kissed Tony’s palm again, the feel of his lips were smooth, subtle, sensual. Tony felt a stirring in his groin that he wasn’t prepared for. “What’s happening?”

“The air,” James said. “It’s coactusol. I can smell it. You will comply. I will comply. But I won’t hurt you. I’m… _Tony, I am sorry_.”

Tony snapped his hand back, used it as a shield over his mouth and nose, but he knew, he knew it was already too late. Fire was building in him, and he knew about coactusol. Alchem-X had gone under because of lawsuits involving their libido enhancing drugs. Supposedly a better Viagra, that worked on women, too, it was supposed to be for people who suffered from lack of interest, or other medical dysfunctions. Instead, it worked like some sort of sex pollen, forcing people to copulate or suffer from cravings, need, and eventually cramps and agonizing pain.

But it did create an urge, and Tony was feeling it. He panted for air and found himself pressing closer to James’ body, eager for skin to skin contact. He couldn’t stop looking at James’ mouth. “Jesus, the stuff works, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” James said. James nudged in, a little closer, nuzzling at Tony’s face until Tony helplessly tipped his chin, giving James access to his mouth for a sweet, utterly necessary, kiss. “I won’t hurt you. I want… I need it, you need it. We’re _bonded_. They don’t have-- they don’t have to do this again, but it’s procedure.”

Those words should have been terrifying, and to some degree they were, but Tony hooked on the word -- again.

“Do they do this to you? Before, I mean?”

“Every time.”

“What happens to your guide?”

James drew in a deep breath, let it out with a slow shudder. “Failure is punished. I fail, I fail them.”

Tony’s eyes ached, how wide was he stretching them open, and James’ hand came up to rub against his groin, which felt good, _so good_ that he was almost sidetracked from their urgent conversation. “If they’re killed because of you, how are you supposed to protect me?” 

He wasn’t even sure he cared, he needed, he needed. James was already peeling out of his clothes, tactical gear and underclothes. It didn’t take Tony even half the time, a simple hospital gown and his drawers.

By the time James got his pants off, Tony was so hard that he ached, rubbing fitfully at himself, fucking up through his fist. James had a gorgeous cock, thick and smooth, bent a little to the right, a proud curve jutting against his belly.

James tugged Tony in, licking his way into Tony’s mouth. Between frantic, needy kisses, he offered a handful of promises, he’d protect Tony, love him, take care of him.

And Tony let him, because he didn’t know what else to do. Good cop, bad cop, aphrodisiacs in the air, death threat hanging over his head, it was all gone. Everything that was left was feeling and need, a fountainhead of emotion that was nothing he’d ever understand. Tony didn’t know where it was coming from, or what would happen when this was over, but right now, he _needed_.

“There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you,” James swore, and in that moment, Tony believed it.

He could feel, a bit, James’ emotions pushing at him, the senses dialed up to eleven, the heat of Tony’s skin, the smell of his breath, the sound of his heart, the taste of his mouth, the sight of him, naked and quivering. James keened, breathing coming faster, his heart pounding, too much, too much. He was trying to focus on one sense, to block the others out, but Tony could tell it wasn’t working, that he was an inch away from being lost to sensation, to zoning out, to being useless. Staring at the wall, unable to move, or think, until something broke it. 

Tony couldn’t afford that right now, and neither could James. If James zoned out while they had coactusol in their system would be painful for both of them. Looked like Tony was going to have to drive. Or, leastways, he didn’t want James to be topping when he went into the zone. That was a good way for everyone to have a bad time of it.

“Shhhh,” Tony said, and he brought James in for another kiss. “It’s okay, close your eyes, you don’t need everything right now. I’m right here.” He guided James to the bed, pushed him down lightly on it. “You just close your eyes, relax. I’ll take care of everything.”

There was lube next to the bed, and Tony supposed he ought to feel some measure of gratitude that they -- whoever they were, really -- didn’t expect them to go through with it with just spit. Although Tony absolutely would have, or a blow job, or something, because if he didn’t get some, and that right soon, he was going to explode.

Prep wasn’t tender, or playful; it was raw and unrestrained, and James was writhing against the sheets in no time, moaning. There was a small part of Tony’s backbrain that was protesting this; but really, it wasn’t like he hadn’t had sex with less consent. Drunken yes still means no and all that. James was eager, he was wanting it, and it really, in the end, didn’t matter.

They were bonded, they were probably going to end up fucking sooner or later, might as well be sooner, right.

“Promise you won’t hate me once the afterglow wears off,” Tony muttered. 

James made some wordless, needy noise under Tony, and it was too late to worry about consent, too late by far to do anything about their situation. 

He wondered if it was always like this, for James. Quite frankly, as strong a Sentinel as he was, he’d practically have to bottom, just because the temptation to zone out would be too strong to resist. Tony knew he didn’t want to be fucked by someone who might hit a zone out and be too distracted to stop. Or might hurt Tony. 

_I’ll never hurt you._

“It’s okay,” Tony crooned, pushing in to that slicked, heated clutch. “I’ve got you, you just let me take care of you.”

James shifted, lifted his hips a little, urging Tony on. His breath sawed harshly in his throat and he thrust in, burying himself to the hilt in James’ compliant body. Gone was any thought of kindness, of tenderness. He was lost in the rhythm, pumping furiously, their bodies slapping together like slow applause. 

James reached backward, hand groping for Tony’s and Tony laced their fingers together, used that grip to drive himself even faster, harder, deeper. It didn’t take long until he was on the shuddering edge of it. “Your turn,” Tony whispered, and he guided James’ hand under his body. James seemed to get the idea, what to do, stroking himself almost punishingly hard.

Tony clenched his fingers against the flesh of James’ thighs, watching as the skin turned red, then white, then red again. He’d probably leave bruises and he didn’t care at all.

A harsh, shaking groan forced itself out of Tony’s throat, and he came like he was breaking in half. Crying out, sharp and shuddering, Tony came, spilling himself into his Sentinel.

And James was his, even as much as he was James’. It didn’t matter that it was what Hydra wanted, it was fact, and Tony couldn’t change it.

Not without breaking them both into pieces.

Afterward, James managed to roll over and Tony found himself cradled against a warm, sated body. “We’ll probably go again, a few times,” James said, stroking Tony’s cheek, the side of his neck, down his arm. “They won’t let us go, until they’re sure.”

“I’m already sure,” Tony said.

“Me, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from a poem by Munia Kahn


End file.
